In many countries, a party involved in a legal proceeding may obtain evidence from an opposing party through various “discovery” devices, such as requests for answers to interrogatories, requests for production of documents, and the like. In recent years, the rise of the information age has lead to the increased role of electronic discovery (or “e-discovery”) in legal proceedings, which involves the discovery of information in electronic format.
One of the primary phases of e-discovery involves identifying (either manually or in an automated fashion using software) files that relate to a current or anticipated legal proceeding or that need to be retained in order to comply with various regulations or legal rules. Once identified, such files may be placed on “hold” (also known as a “legal hold”) in an effort to preserve the potentially relevant information they contain. For example, a legal hold may prevent the deletion of potentially relevant files until a current or anticipated legal proceeding has been fully resolved or until all applicable regulations and/or legal rules have been satisfied.
Unfortunately, existing technologies used to identify and place legal holds on files may suffer from one or more shortcomings and/or inefficiencies that may result in the retention of data in an inefficient, wasteful manner. For example, many existing legal-hold technologies apply a legal hold to an entire backup image of a device, even if only a small portion of the files contained in such an image are relevant to the current or anticipated legal proceeding and/or regulation. In addition, existing legal-hold technologies may place a legal hold on multiple versions and/or copies of the same file, potentially resulting in the retention of redundant information. Existing legal-hold technologies may also store files that have been placed on legal hold on relatively expensive storage (such as disk storage), regardless of the purpose for the legal hold. As such, the instant disclosure identifies a need for systems and methods for efficiently and effectively preserving files that have been placed on legal hold.